Moulton’s iPad app, Nomster Chef, is one of several student projects featured in the article and accompanying video:

Before cooking, children receive an educational video about a food they’ll be working with – for example, a video on how mushrooms grow. The app also incorporates food information in the recipe steps, like the fact that tomatoes are actually a fruit.

…

After user-testing the app prototype, “I heard from parents that they noticed differences in how their kids are eating,” Moulton said. The app also kept kids engaged throughout the cooking process.

For her project, fellow student Karen Wang developed an iPad app called FeelingTalk that helps children with autism interpret facial expressions:

…[I]n the first level of FeelingTalk, kids choose the one face that’s different (a sad face) from the three happy faces on the screen. The app will then label the different face “sad.”

“My app will be utilizing learning mechanics that directly work with the autistic brain to help them work on something that they’re having difficulty with,” Wang said. “By leveraging something they’re good at, we’re going to teach them to get comfortable looking at people’s faces, examining the key features, and eventually understanding emotions.”

Moulton, Wang and other students will present their work this afternoon at the LDT Expo at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Food words trending in today’s newspapers could help predict a country’s obesity rates in three years, according to findings recently published in the journal BMC Public Health.

In the study, researchers examined whether media mentions of food predate obesity prevalence by analyzing mentions of foods in New York Times and London Times articles over the past 50 years. Using this data, they statistically correlated it with each country’s annual Body Mass Index, or BMI. Brennan Davis, PhD, lead author of the study and an associate professor of marketing at California Polytechnic State University, said in a release that results showed:

The more sweet snacks are mentioned and the fewer fruits and vegetables that are mentioned in your newspaper, the fatter your country’s population is going to be in 3 years, according to trends we found from the past fifty years … But the less often they’re mentioned and the more vegetables are mentioned, the skinnier the public will be.

Researchers say the research could help public health officials better understand the effectiveness of current obesity interventions.

Ever wondered what the difference between a food allergy and a food sensitivity is? Neha Shah, MPH, RD, CNSC, a registered dietician at the Stanford Digestive Health Center, sheds some light in a new video.

In people with food allergies, she explains, the immune system responds to the presence of the food, which isn’t the case for food sensitivities. People with food allergies have to avoid the culprit foods entirely, whereas people with food sensitivities can sometimes have small amounts of the food – though they must figure out what their threshold is. (Too much and the offending food might set off other symptoms like gas, bloating or diarrhea.) Shah uses lactose intolerance as an example of a very common food sensitivity and describes how people can understand their threshold.

If any or all of those sound tasty, or at least worth trying, then you’re probably a food neophile, aka an adventurous eater. And for you, I’m the bearer of good news: Adventurous eaters have lower body-mass indexes and are generally more conscious about healthy eating than their less adventurous diners, according to a study published recently in Obesity.

Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Vermont recruited about 500 women and had them complete a survey on their eating habits and willingness to try new things and foods. The answers shed insight into the connections between healthy habits and adventurousness:

…Adventurous eaters were less concerned that a food was easy to prepare and about its price, but more interested in cooking as a way to connect with their heritage and more likely to have friends over for dinner. Given that cooking at home is associated with lower BMI and increased consumption of healthy foods, if adventurous eaters are comfortable with foods that were harder to prepare, and often have friends over for dinner, it may be that they prepare their own food more often than non-adventurous eaters. Furthermore, eating with others versus eating alone has been associated with decreased intake in some studies. The lower concern about price of foods exhibited by more adventurous eaters is in line with characteristics of foodies, who are much more concerned with food quality than food price. Because healthy foods are often more expensive than junk foods and require preparation, adventurous eaters may be more likely to procure and prepare these types of foods than non-adventurous eaters.

The authors go on to write that the findings “have exciting practical implications” and suggest “several strategies [that] practitioners could use to help increase adventurousness.” But they acknowledge the research has several limitations, including its lack of men and definition of “adventurousness.”

As you’ve probably heard, the FDA ruled last week to ban trans-fats and phase them out of all food products over the next three years. This news has beenwidelycovered, both heralded for its health implications and critiqued for being too long in coming. Yet either way, it is not a panacea, as Stanford Medicine professor Christopher Gardner, PhD, explained when he shared his opinion with me over the weekend:

The true impact of the FDA ban on trans-fats will not be known until we find out what substitutes the food industry finds, and what that does to the sale of junk food and the health of Americans in response to the switch. It could be beneficial. But it isn’t as if trans-fats will be gone and everyone will eat an extra two servings of vegetables in their place.

Gardner, who has spent the past 20 years researching the health benefits of various nutrition components, pointed out that “a lot of good people and excellent scientists worked on this for a long time” and “it took a great deal of effort to assemble the science to demonstrate that this is something so harmful in the American diet that it should be removed with an FDA ban.” He also offered more specifics on what food companies might do following the ban:

The companies making those products are unlikely to remove those junk food products entirely from the shelves of grocery stores across America. Instead, it is most likely that they will look for an alternate form of fat that will serve as closely as possible the same role that trans-fats served. Trans-fats act like saturated fats in terms of being solid rather than liquid at room temperature. This can help the icing on a cupcake stay solid, and it can give a “mouth feel” of solid fat that people like to taste in their food. The goal of the food industry will be to replace the trans-fat with another fat that is solid at room temperature, which likely means the replacement could very well be as bad as the trans fats themselves.

For example, palm oil or esterified stearic acid are likely to be options. For the palm oil, this will mean destruction of rain forests and biological diversity. For esterified stearic acid, this will mean another reason to grow more monocultures of soybeans from which to extract the oil. Both of these will likely have a negative environmental impact. There are likely other choices to consider.

After all this, will those junk foods now be health foods? Absolutely not. They might be slightly healthier junk foods, but still junk foods.

What if we could “leapfrog” over the education and technology gap in low-resource countries, while at the same time improving maternal and early childhood health in those areas? That is precisely the promise of a new Stanford-sponsored initiative spearheaded by Maya Adam, MD, a lecturer in the human biology program here.

I recently had the chance to speak on the phone with Adam and hear more about this project, which consists of designing picture-based educational videos that are loaded on tablets and distributed among community-health workers. At present, the video on child nutrition is being used as a pilot in South Africa through the organization Philani, where twelve “mentor mothers” have been using the tablets since March. As you’ll read below, there is immense potential for the project to scale up in the near future.

What have the results of this initiative been so far?

The feedback that we’ve gotten was that a lot of the mothers being counseled said, “You know, you’ve been using phrases like ‘balanced diet’ for many years, and I didn’t quite know what that meant until I saw the plate with the green vegetables and the little bit of protein and the little bit of grains.” Certain phrases became clearer when they were drawn in pictures. Also, we found a lot of the children wanted to come watch because it was a screen-based activity.

The workers themselves found it useful to convince their patients, for example, of the importance of prenatal care, because when the patients heard it both from the video and from them, it was almost as if the video was validating their messaging. So they’re very eager to have the project continue. They have a whole list of other videos they want us to make, from breastfeeding to HIV/AIDS prevention… It’s really been a powerful way both to teach and give these highly intelligent women access to technology that could enhance their education and help them overcome the barriers in their lives.

How easy would it be to use these videos in different regions of the world?

We have videos translated into English, Xhosa, and now Spanish, because they’ll be used next in Guatemala… We can use English in the U.S. in under-resourced locations. These are all very universal messages, and that’s why it’s so exciting: For a relatively small amount of effort, we can make videos that can be both translated into many other languages, and subtly altered visually so they resemble women and children in each different part of the world. For example, while we were creating the video, we put the braids that African women traditionally wear in their hair on a different layer of the Photoshop, so that layer can be removed and the resulting woman will have straight dark hair that would be more appropriate for use, say, in Guatemala.

We thought a lot about how to represent food. A real plate of food from South Africa would be culturally inappropriate in Guatemala, but by using cartoon images of fruits and vegetables, it becomes much more universal… We tried to show a variety of different fruits and vegetables without specifically showing that “this is a guava,” because a guava might not grow in other parts of the world.

Residency is one of the most intense times in a surgeon’s training, and it can take a toll physically and mentally on newly minted medical school graduates as they learn to cope.

To help them counter that stress, Stanford’s Department of Surgery started the Balance in Life Program for its residents. The program, and one of its team-building exercises – a sailing lesson in one of the world’s best sailing spots, the San Francisco Bay – were highlighted in a recent Inside Stanford Medicinestory.

As described in the piece, the program is dedicated to the memory of Greg Feldman, MD, a former chief surgical resident at Stanford who committed suicide in 2010. The program provides basics like easy-to-access healthy meals, group therapy sessions and social activities, and Ralph Greco, MD, the program’s director said of it:

A lot of people would argue with the notion that such a program is necessary… I know our day of sailing may raise some eyebrows, but our faculty decided that we should do whatever we could to give these young people the tools they need to help them deal with the vicissitudes of life and medicine through the rest of their careers.

The article also notes that the program attracts residents interested in work-life balance to Stanford:

“The fact that we have this Balance in Life Program is great for recruitment of like-minded individuals,” [resident Micaela Esquivel, MD,] said. “I can tell medical students considering us that they would be hard-pressed to find another program that cares enough about their well-being to offer what we do.”

Livestock can no longer be fed antibiotics “preventatively” or to help them grow bigger. The FDA has ruled to change their regulations of how drugs can be administered to food animals, including those used to make animal feed.

After this ruling, livestock producers can only use antibiotics to treat animals that actually have an infection, and only under the supervision of a veterinarian. These new rules are aimed at decreasing the risk of developing drug-resistant bacteria, sometimes called “super bugs.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug-resistant bacteria cause 2 million illnesses and about 23,000 deaths in the United States each year.

According to an article from The Hill, the Department of Health and Human Services is moving forward with new regulations for hospitals, and President Obama has called on government cafeterias to prioritize meat that has been raised with responsible antibiotic practices.

Malnutrition is a leading cause of mortality in children under the age of five, contributing to approximately 3.5 million child deaths worldwide each year. Currently, the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders recommend using calculations based on the patient’s body weight or arm circumference to assess their nutritional status. But, it’s not known if they are reliable measures of malnutrition in children that suffer from diarrhea and dehydration — two symptoms that can affect body weight and are common in undernourished kids.

Now, a study (subscription required) published this month in the Journal of Nutrition shows that mid-upper arm circumference can accurately assess malnutrition in children with diarrhea and dehydration and it’s better at assessing malnutrition than weight-based measures.

In the study, Rhode Island Hospital emergency medicine physician Adam Levine, MD, and his team analyzed 721 records of children (under the age of five) who were examined at an urban hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh for acute diarrhea. They found that measurements based on a child’s mid-upper arm circumference accurately diagnosed malnutrition, but measurements based on weight were unreliable and misdiagnosed about 12-14 percent of the cases when the patient had diarrhea and dehydration.

“Because dehydration lowers a child’s weight, using weight-based assessments in children presenting with diarrhea may be misleading,” Levine said in a press release. “When children are rehydrated and returned to a stable, pre-illness weight, they may still suffer from severe acute malnutrition.”

Since poor nutrition is a common problem in areas where medical resources are limited, the best tools to diagnose malnutrition are effective and inexpensive. Tape measures are cheaper and are often easier to come by than scales, so the results of this study are especially encouraging for people who want the best and most affordable way to measure malnutrition in children. “Based on our results, clinicians and community health workers can confidently use the mid-upper arm measurement to guide nutritional supplementation for children with diarrhea,” said Levine.

This Monday was the sixth annual Stanford Women’s Health Forum, hosted by Stanford’s Women and Sex Differences in Medicine center (WSDM), and I was happy to have been present for the lively talks. The forum focused on prevention, and the keynote, delivered by Marcia Stefanick, PhD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and WSDM director, highlighted physical activity and weight management as the key preventative actions for women to take.

High blood pressure remains the number one preventable cause of death in women, with physical inactivity and high BMI, both of which contribute to high blood pressure, in third and fourth place. (For the curious readers, smoking comes in second.) Because prevention requires changes in behavior, behavior was what Stefanick focused on. Rather than reinforcing many women’s feelings of embarrassment about their weight, she said, providers should help women feel that they can do something about it.

Healthier behaviors must include diet and exercise. Both fatness and low fitness cause higher mortality; realistic expectations about how to change both should factor into care. Stefanick emphasized that weight loss should be slow: 10 percent of one’s body weight baseline over six months, or one pound per week for moderately overweight people, and no more than two pounds per week. And we need to stop being so sedentary, Stefanick exclaimed. The classic principles of exercise apply – gradually increase the frequency, intensity, and/or duration of exertion. Adults should be getting at least two and a half hours of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity per week, in addition to doing muscle-strengthening activities at least twice a week, the conference flyer read.

However, citing the problems of eating disorders and older women losing weight without trying, Stefanick stressed that “weight management is a spectrum; there are extremes at both ends.” In describing variations on mesomorphic, endomorphic, and ectomorphic body types, she stated that “we don’t know what the optimal body type is.” It probably varies for each person.

Something I found particularly interesting was Stefanick’s description of gynoid vs android fat distribution patterns (which I learned as “pear” and “apple” body shapes, respectively). Gynoid distribution around the hips, thighs, and butt is more common in women, and includes more subcutaneous fat, while in android distribution, which is more common in men, fat collects around the belly and chest and is actually dispersed among the organs. Such intra-abdominal fat is more damaging to health, as it affects the liver and lipid profile and can cause heart disease, but it’s also much easier to get rid of through exercise (which is one reason men overall have less trouble losing weight than women).

In the spirit of more personalized care, Stefanick also discussed how recommended weight changes during pregnancy should vary according to the person’s prenatal BMI. Someone underweight could gain up to 40 pounds and be healthy, she pointed out, while obese people might actually lose weight during pregnancy for optimal mother-baby health.